Originally reported by cloudcomputing-news.net, June 2017.
Turbonomic 5.9: Hybrid Cloud Management Extends to AWS and Azure
Turbonomic, a Boston-based cloud and virtualization software provider, announced general availability of its 5.9 release in June 2017, marking a significant expansion of its platform to include native support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure public cloud environments. The release aimed to help enterprise customers accelerate adoption of hybrid cloud architectures while maintaining operational control and cost discipline.
Key Features in the 5.9 Release
The 5.9 release introduced a range of capabilities targeting hybrid and multi-cloud operational challenges:
- Unified workload visibility: Operators gain a single view of all workloads regardless of whether they run on-premises, in AWS, or in Azure.
- Cloud cost reduction: Turbonomic claimed customers could lower public cloud bills by an average of 30% through automated rightsizing and workload optimization. (See review notes.)
- Migration planning: The platform assists teams in planning and executing migrations to AWS and Azure, including workload placement recommendations.
- Workload scaling: Automated scaling decisions are made in real-time based on application demand and resource availability.
- Public cloud workload control: Customers can enforce policies that govern how workloads behave once they are running in public cloud environments.
- Compliance enforcement: Policies can be applied consistently across hybrid environments to maintain governance and compliance posture.
The Case for Dynamic Optimization
To contextualize the release, Turbonomic cited a Gartner forecast at the time suggesting that by 2020, a quarter of large enterprises would adopt dynamic optimization solutions to manage public cloud workloads, up from less than 1% in 2016. Gartner defined dynamic optimization as:
“A technology capability that uses telemetry, algorithms, service and resource analytics, and policies to drive automated actions that reduce waste, cost and risk exposure, while simultaneously improving service levels.”
Turbonomic — previously known as VMTurbo before rebranding — was named as a representative vendor in Gartner’s analysis of this category in April 2016. The company’s positioning in this space informed its product direction leading up to the 5.9 release.
The Challenge of Hybrid Cloud Workload Management
Shmuel Kliger, Turbonomic founder and president, described the core problem the release addresses:
“Transitioning to hybrid cloud presents a new challenge: deciding which workload should run where and when, and confidently managing the transition. It’s a cloud-scale challenge that can only be solved with self-managing software.”
“With today’s announcement, Turbonomic is uniquely positioned to help customers monitor and automate their workloads anywhere — on premises and/or in public cloud — in real-time, to unleash the full potential of the public cloud’s elasticity and scale.”
— Shmuel Kliger, Founder and President, Turbonomic
The underlying technical argument is that hybrid cloud environments are too dynamic for manual capacity planning and placement decisions. As workload profiles change continuously, automated systems that can act on telemetry in real time become essential for both performance assurance and cost efficiency.
Multi-Cloud Adoption: Cost vs. Business Continuity
Around the same period, Turbonomic — in partnership with Verizon — released research examining enterprise motivations for multi-cloud adoption. The findings highlighted a tension common in the industry: while business continuity ranked as the most important strategic driver for adopting multi-cloud strategies, cost dominated as the primary differentiator organizations actually evaluated in practice.
Turbonomic’s position was that focusing on cost alone risked undermining service quality. The company cautioned that a purely cost-driven approach was “not a recipe for assuring customers are delighted with your service” — a perspective that also framed the 5.9 release’s emphasis on automated, policy-driven management rather than simple cost-cutting tools.
Context: Turbonomic’s Evolution and Subsequent Acquisition
Turbonomic rebranded from VMTurbo in 2016 to reflect its broadening scope beyond VMware-centric virtualization management into multi-cloud and hybrid cloud operations. The 5.9 release represented a milestone in that broader platform strategy. IBM later acquired Turbonomic in 2021, integrating its workload optimization capabilities into IBM’s AIOps and cloud management portfolio.
For DevOps and platform engineering teams evaluating workload optimization tools, the principles Turbonomic 5.9 embodied — unified visibility, automated placement, and continuous rightsizing — remain highly relevant criteria when assessing modern FinOps and cloud management platforms.